[Side note: I would normally use Storify for a recap like this but I didn’t capture the tweets at the time so it’s now easier to embed them manually. I used Storify to recap my first digital/social media campaign (in 2011) and other events. I’ve also used it as a resume of sorts back when I was looking for a job after grad school. More recently, I’ve used it as a sort of storage locker of things I’ve done that have gotten me to this point. My hope it that (even without any comments), it shows the progression of my experience in higher ed marketing starting with blogging for Mount Allison seven years ago to some recent posts on Analytics.

Anyways, all of that is just to say: Storify is a great tool, it just isn’t right for this post. Also, given the embeds, I’m not using standard English grammatical conventions so…sorry if that bothers you.]

So conferences can be pretty overwhelming with the amount of information offered in them. I’ve been to/organized a dozen different workshops/conferences/summits/whatever you want to call them (at different times/for different reasons) and I think so far #eduweb15 has matched my specific needs and interests the most specifically (as a web communicator/marketer). An important note is that I haven’t yet been to many other conferences (among them #heweb, #casesmc, and #pseweb, about which I’ve heard great things).

For this conference, I had done a lot of research and had put together a lot of the presenters in a Twitter list (this being the first time nearly everyone I interacted with used Twitter regularly).

At one point, a keynote speaker, @sree, noted that I was the only K-12 (N-12, really) person at the conference. I attended because higher ed institutions are generally more advanced in terms of digital marketing and are generally more willing to share their more advanced tactics, which seemed like a great reason to attend.

Independent school and higher ed marketing have a number of important differences, however, there is a lot of knowledge/skill that is transferable between the two. As evidence, independent school communication leaders, including Peter Baron, found information from the conference’s Twitter stream to be true for independent schools as well.

The conference was to many (including myself) in part, a call-to-action to take full advantage the full range of social media marketing tools and featured. The insights from hands-on use add tremendously to even the knowledge that Facebook itself shares with advertisers.

The keynote lunch by Higher Ed web professional Mark Greenfield was a commiseration about issues caused by the structure/nature of institutions of learning.

There was also some immediately practical advice on advertising, for instance, making the most of your AdWords dollars

As the communication habits of the target audience of college change rapidly, higher ed has to adapt. Despite some controversy surrounding reddit, recent developments (including many high-profile IAmAs and leadership/policy changes), reddit is now useful for sharing knowledge/expertise.

As the conference wore on, the changing nature of website use was discussed. The current reality is that users are less apt to do what higher ed professionals want them to do by default, and therefore inbound marketing and lead nurturing is becoming more and more necessary. This fact was illustrated more succinctly with this cartoon

There were many implications that affect both higher ed and independent schools, including so called “ghost applicants” or in Carnegie Communications’ vernacular (which I prefer), “non-compliant prospects”.

Carnegie Communications also shared insights from some anonymized reports because it’s not really the data that’s most valuable, it’s the ability to collect and interpret the data effectively which makes analytics so important.

[It should be noted that sharing dashboards shares the layout/’queries’, so to speak, but not any actual data.]

The conference ended on a high note from Lee McCabe, Global Head of Travel + Education Strategy at Facebook. I think one of the most useful points he made was the ability Facebook has to find lookalike audiences similar to a defined set of people

You want to get back in front of your website visitors within 1 hour of when they left. #eduweb15

So it was a great conference in terms of the sessions but also in the type of people it attracts. I made a number of contacts, including a fellow web communications person who just to happens to work at a school in Greater Philadelphia.

As I help my school stand out in this competitive environment, I often spend free time learning more and becoming proficient in using online tools to their highest potential value for us. Today I successfully passed the Google Video Advertising exam and have advanced certification in the topic. As video advertising becomes more popular, I’m glad it’s now a tool I feel comfortable using.

You might not expect something with a title that dry to be thrilling for me to write, but it is.

[Note: This post may read as a bit of a “stream of consciousness” on the state of higher ed communications, so please forgive the tangents. Speaking of tangents, here’s a running list of things I’ve worked on since I began working in higher ed communications four years ago.]

Four years ago I was completing a project I had been working on all summer – brainstorming ideas, scripting questions, location scouting, casting, and interviewing compelling characters for a video series at Mount Allison University. I had just completed my first social media audit (sorry, it’s cover only because the full report has some proprietary information), and wanted to put my recommendations into actions. With some general oversight (and videography done by a co-worker), I went about helping to create a video series for incoming students in hopes of reducing summer melt by quelling their fears and answering some of their questions without them having to ask. We made a total of 20 videos and shared them over the month of August.

While it’s not easy to connect watching a video to a certain action (as Google’s various attribution models would attest even for simple transactions), we did set up a systematic approach to sharing the videos (via the website, social channels, and yes, even old-fashioned emails) and reporting on the effectiveness of the campaign with some basic metrics. Before long we attracted the attention of Academica Group, an equivalent Canada has to mStoner with their Top 10 emails going to thousands of leaders in higher ed research and marketing. [Here’s the reaction from #PSEweb leaders. It was pretty cool to see a project I worked so much on get a positive response.]

[Side note: It was four years ago at Mount Allison that I began working professionally in higher ed marketing and when I could first verbalize why knew I wanted to do it as a career.]

Expectations of digital marketing efforts of college-bound students, (as described in the industry-standard E-Expectations report) he internet has changed dramatically since 2011, video becoming a more and more useful source of information for prospective students. Colleges and universities, then, have (and have to) become more thoughtful in the way they measure the effectiveness of campaigns beyond number of views. I wrote about how one can infer quality, relevance and other important insights from a video’s metrics (with YouTube’s video analytics).

In addition to improved video metric reporting over time, social media campaign effectiveness has come into the spotlight. As prospective students turn to social media (with 60% of seniors seeing it as a reliable source of information), thoughtful engagement (and, of increasing importance, conversion) strategies and analysis have become more sophisticated.

To really stay ahead of the competition online, schools need to reach beyond their immediate circles and learn from the experts in the field, which often means going beyond your industry. I for one, have been doing my best to learn from that advice. I’ve read analytics, content marketing, and analytics books and blogs from beyond the silos independent school and higher ed marketers can find themselves in. It’s not a matter of becoming a coder or taking on another category of job duties, but taking the best advice from people who do digital analytics for a living. Beyond day-to-day reading to inform how I keep organized and efficient, I’ve also made a commitment to never stop learning.

Since starting at FCS and helping to launch our new website, I’ve taking advanced Google Analytics training from LunaMetrics, learned what the top CASE colleges and universities in the region are doing through a CASE D2 Scholarship, reviewed and became re-certified in AdWords ahead of the Fall admission ‘season’, and am currently reviewing HTML and re-learning CSS to make sure our landing pages are the best they can be.

Competition for students among private schools is not forecasted to lessen any time soon. As higher ed has had to adapt to changing realities, the responsibility of having a effective web presence has moved from being an IT webmaster’s problem to more of a communication issue. Do any search of what used to be one job in communications, say, “writer”, and you’ll see the role has become a “Web Writer and Content Strategist” who, in addition to “developing and implementing institutional social media strategy”, now is required to have an understanding of different content management systems, HTML, and Google Analytics.

Indeed, at some institutions, the responsibility for the website has been entirely subsumed by admissions and is placed into the hands of a Manager of Online Recruitment and Web Communication. This is no doubt a writing role, however, the requirement of having “strong copywriting and editing skills” coming 9th to others, including working with a CMS, experience in online marketing, PPC advertising, and HTML.

All of the above and more is why I’m proud to work at an institution that is aware of the changing nature of web development/communications/enrollment marketing and invests in a position like mine to ensure that the school’s mission is heard above the digital noise. While the ‘disruption’ seen in higher education is not going to be experienced the same way in independent schools, I’m glad to be learning how to stay ahead of whichever curve we’re on by learning from higher ed marketing experts at EduWeb Digital Summit in Chicago in a couple weeks (thanks to the school and a conference registration fee waiver provided by the conference organizers).

I’m excited to learn more about how best to keep telling our institutions’ stories in ways that reach and engage our target audiences where they are. I think sessions like “”How to Use YouTube and Hangouts on Air for Creating Differentiated Video Content” will help us get the most out of and improve upon what we’ve already done with Hangouts on Air (like our live-streamed Hour of Code Assembly).

On Thursday (July 10th), I presented (alongside web consultants from Blackbaud (then WhippleHill)) on how private schools can immediately take advantage of the most immediately useful insights on Google Analytics. Below is a snapshot of the conference program and slides from my presentation. The video and slide deck are below.

After the presentation I had some great in person and online feedback. It was a great experience for me and I’m glad that people at other schools found it helpful. I need to include a shout-out to my Public Speaking professor Dennis Kinsey of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications for helping prepare me for professional speaking roles. I don’t think my talk would have gone as well without his help.

@GeoffBCampbell The only session that inspired drooling apparently. It must have been good. My colleague won't leave me alone about it!

I’ll be writing about my best practices paper on higher ed use of social media (which will be written after I attend Michael Stoner’s talk on exactly that at PRSA’s Counselors to Higher Education Senior Summit next week), the forthcoming Tobacco-Free campus initiative campaign book my PR campaigns class group is working on with our client the Lerner Center, and hopefully at least a couple digital literacy/job hunt videos I’m working on at SU. (I know AP style but I’m going to use it whenever I’m not forced to abandon it).

For now here’s my Syracuse University sense of place video

and my apology for not posting often by way of a picture of an adorable dog I found in Berkeley, CA who was nice enough to pose for me:

Every year, the Counselors to Higher Education (CHE) section of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) holds a Senior Summit where practitioners can learn hear from experienced executives on best practices and learn from one another what they can do to improve the communication activities at their higher education institutions.

The Summit bills itself as the “premier annual event on higher education communications” and this year they clearly set out to live up to that expectation.

This year’s Summit features the following:

A keynote luncheon by Michael Stoner entitled “Social Works: How #HigherEd Uses #SocialMedia to Raise Money, Build Awareness, Recruit Students and Get Results“.

A session discussing the first ever research on CHE members of duties and how practitioners “can gain a seat at the table in order to practice truly strategic public relations” led by Rosalynne D. Whitaker-Heck from Hampton University and Jeanette DeDiemar from Florida State University

a panel discussion about hosting the 2012 Presidential Debates at University of Denver Daniels College of Business and Lynn University

A panel discussion led by John Morgan, associate vice president for public relations at Quinnipiac University entitled “The Next Time: Lessons Learned from Hurricane Sandy”

A keynote luncheon by Jason Simon, director of marketing communications at the University of California entitled: “Marketing Blunder? Hardly. How Being “Boldly Californian” Brought Down a Logo and Left A Stronger University of California”

and many more discussions and opportunities for networking.

While I’m the only attendee currently registered who is not already working full-time I plan to get everything I can out of this investment of time and money. I’ll be taking extensive notes on what I assume will be insightful lectures and discussions in addition to the opportunity to hear from dozens of industry professionals. I’m very excited for this opportunity to learn firsthand insights from masters in the field I hope to enter in June.

There is a private list of attendees only for those attending but there is also a page on Lanyrd for the event.

I just wanted to share with you that I had my first guest post published on doteduguru.com. It’s a bit about my case study on Syracuse University’s Social Media use (Broadcast AND Engagement) that I wrote for my graduate PR Theory class at Newhouse. Here’s a snippet below.

As many of you know, Syracuse University is a school that is “smart” at social media. Kate Brodock, executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University directs a student team that manages SU’s social media presence and they do an admirable job at spreading SU’s message effectively and engaging with a variety of stakeholders online.

As many of you know, Syracuse University is a school that is “smart” at social media. Kate Brodock, executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University directs a student team that manages SU’s social media presence and they do an admirable job at spreading SU’s message effectively and engaging with a variety of stakeholders online.

I combined that background research with in-depth interviews, news reports, and archival information to have concrete evidence to support the notion that engagement with many stakeholders via social media is crucial to effective public relations practice in higher education. However, that’s not the long and short of it. It’s not enough to simply say “We need to be on Facebook and tweet at people and have videos of campus with corny music.” It’s about having an understanding of where your audiences are, what kind of content interests them, and in what form they want that content.

Being open to communicating with stakeholders makes this much easier and having an understanding of website and social media analytics doubly so. My paper is nowhere near the final word, but it’s a start.

Note: This semester, as a a graduate intern for Kate Brodock I’ll be working on content strategy for the school’s various accounts, organizing all the multitude of accounts of the school, and after I learn how to do so effectively in “NEW 600: Visual Journalism”, creating video content for the school.